Gabriel Sherman has a huge profile of Jared Kushner in New York magazine today, with a hefty section devoted to his father's little "Set up my brother-in-law with a hooker and secretly tape it and send the video to his family" episode, which landed him in jail. But let's start with Jared's high praise for the Observer, the paper that's been wracked by layoffs and budget cuts under his leadership:

"I found the paper unbearable to read, it was like homework," Jared tells me.

Haha. But Jared is changing that! With his powers of motivation. After he hired PR man Bob Sommer as President of the Observer, he told him, " We called it Weekend at Bernie's, because it was like dead people walking around." Good one! After the NYO's longtime editor Peter Kaplan left and severe layoffs hit the paper, Jared put it to his underpaid, beleaguered journalists straight:

At a meeting last month, Jared told his staff that the Observer needed to move on. "Kaplan is a classy guy, but he's old-school," Jared said. "If we were doing our jobs right, Gawker wouldn't have a reason to exist. Curbed wouldn't have a reason to exist.
"Every Observer writer wants to be a novelist," he went on. "But we need to be deliberate about when we are short and when we are long."

Jared, you are our reason to exist. And your writers don't want to be novelists; they have to, because you laid them off. But Jared's not the type to buy into the doom and gloom; he 's optimistic about the dying newspaper industry to a comical extent. Let's hope he's just lying to put on a happy face:

"I think we're definitely at a bottom for newspapers," he said a couple of weeks later. "Once this Russian winter is over, once the papers fail that should fail, you'll see a resurgence. I think the Observer two years from now will be a very viable entity."

He also promised to run the NYO as a "profit-making entity," which would be a pretty historic moment! Jared seems like not a terrible guy, though, considering the way he grew up—favorite son of a mogul father, who hired a PI to set up his brother-in-law, who he hated, with a hooker, and then had to be talked out of sending the video of the incident to his brother-in-law's children. Jared does not seem to be that cut throat, at least. His dad made huge donations to Harvard and then to NYU to smooth Jared's admission to those august institutions. And it's paid off; the swaggering underclassman has blossomed into a total heart throb. Ivanka Trump found his pimp game irresistible. Their steamy secret of attraction:

"Jared and I are very similar in that we're very ambitious," Ivanka tells me one morning in her office on the 25th floor of the Trump Tower. "That's what makes it so amazing to be in a relationship with someone who is supportive of that. I'm happy for him when he is in the office working late. I know how good that feels when you sit down and return e-mails."

We're fanning ourselves rapidly! Jared Kushner's made some mistakes, sure. He may not be able to run a newspaper very well (who can, these days?), but he's great material. As long as you don't work for him.
[New York Mag. Pic: Getty]

If you'll recall back to Clinton friend and White House staffer Vince Foster's suicide and the plane crash that killed Clinton administration Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Christopher Ruddy, at the time working at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, worked diligently to promote his theories that both men were murdered for political reasons, implicating that the Clinton's maybe-kinda-probably had something to do with it in each case. But that's all water under the bridge now for Clinton and Ruddy, who are now a couple of old chums.

Among those he has been friendly with lately is Christopher Ruddy, a conservative journalist who was a chief proponent of cover-up theories involving the Clintons during the 1990s. In his book, "The Strange Death of Vincent Foster," Ruddy rejected official findings that Foster, a deputy White House counsel, killed himself in a Virginia park and suggested the possibility of "a cover-up conducted by people who have, with the help of the press, placed themselves above the law." Ruddy also advanced the notion that Ron Brown, the Clinton commerce secretary who died in an airplane crash in Croatia in 1996, was actually shot in the head.

Ruddy today is the founder and chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative news-magazine. He told me he came around on Clinton after Ed Koch, the former New York mayor, introduced them. That led to lunches and more contacts, and now Ruddy says he was wrong about Clinton. "I do consider Bill Clinton a friend, and I think he would consider me a friend," Ruddy said. "And to think of all the wars we went through in the '90s, it seems almost surreal."

With the passage of time, Ruddy said he came to believe that Clinton was much less liberal than his enemies thought. After all, Clinton overhauled welfare, tamed the deficit and promoted free trade. While still a proud "Reagan conservative," Ruddy said he now thinks the attacks on Clinton in the 1990s went too far. "Did we like and enjoy all the salacious reporting and all the stuff going on in the '90s?" he asked. "I guess we thought, This is just politics. But looking back at my role, I was probably over the top. And if I knew then what I know today, I wouldn't have pursued some of that stuff as aggressively as I did. I did an honest reporter's job. But I have a different take on it now."

Ruddy also attributes his change of heart to Clinton's foundation, which has impressed him and other onetime foes. Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher who financed Ruddy's investigations and other anti-Clinton activities, is now a contributor to the foundation. So is Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman whose Fox News was a regular thorn in Clinton's side. Clinton over the years has also made peace with other former adversaries, like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. The elder George Bush told me he now considers Clinton "a real friend." When I asked what changed his view, he wrote in an e-mail message: "I didn't know him personally back then. I knew him, but not up close and personal. Now I do."

So if Clinton is friends with all of his old political opponents, who the hell is he hating on these days? Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy and Bill Richardson and Jesse Jackson and just about every other prominent Democrat who had the audacity to support Obama in the primary against Hillary, that's who!

People close to Clinton said he has largely got over his resentment at Obama but not toward Ted Kennedy and his niece, Caroline Kennedy. As Clinton sees it, they say, he did so much for the Kennedys over the years that he felt they became almost family. Nor has he forgiven Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who endorsed Obama even though Clinton appointed him to two cabinet posts. And the man once called the "first black president" remains deeply wounded by allegations that he made racially insensitive remarks during the campaign, like dismissing Obama's South Carolina win by comparing it with Jesse Jackson's victories there in the 1980s.

"None of them ever really took seriously the race rap," he told me. "They knew it was politics. I had one minister in Texas in the general election come up and put his arm around me." This was an Obama supporter. "And he came up, threw his arm around me and said, ‘You've got to forgive us for that race deal.' He said, ‘That was out of line.' But he said, ‘You know, we wanted to win real bad.' And I said, ‘I got no problem with that.' I said it's fine; it's O.K. And we laughed about it and we went on." The other side is moving on, too. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, who once recalled an angry Clinton berating him on the phone for criticizing the former president's campaign rhetoric, is letting bygones be bygones, at least publicly. "No fence-mending is needed," Clyburn said through a spokeswoman.

Unfortunately, there was no mention in the article about which models and starlets Clinton banged on Ron Burkle's dirty old man fuck-plane, which was a major disappointment. Oh well, maybe next time.

The Mellowing Of Bill Clinton [New York Times Magazine]

His dad, the elder Taki, is a big old rich horndog who likes to talk about fucking younger girls all the time; the younger Taki, known as J.T., is a bike messenger and an artist who works in the Nokia cameraphone medium and lives in his own place in Red Hook and he has two kids with a totally hot wife but they're separated and he went to prep school and smoked weed and "messed with" girls and lost his virginity and then got really into graffiti and lived in Paris for a while and got in a fight with Puffy in St. Tropez and met his totally hot wife in Gstaad and now he really just wants to chill and ride his bike and smoke weed and do his art, okay.

Spencer Morgan is now working on a purely conceptual level. [NYO]

“I think these things are cyclical, and great families survive if they’re intelligent. And again, if they have a lot of members of the family who are actually out there trying to make something of themselves,” he said. “These things are horrible and they destroy wealth and they destroy opportunity for a lot of people, but hopefully great families who have more than one person who have done some great things can continue to preserve capital and build new wealth—so when something like this happens, you’re not destroyed, you’re set back.”

Then Mr. Van Rensselaer and Ms. Menniken hopped in a chauffeured SUV and headed down Park Avenue.

Also his model girlfriend dislikes the word "moist." [NYO; Pic via NY Social Diary]

• "The ex-Goldman Sachs vice president lives in the pleasant Washington, DC suburb with wife, Minal, 32, and their enormous brown shaggy Newfoundland dog, Winslow - named after former Browns star tight end Kellen Winslow."
• "His high school yearbook is filled with quotes he chose from rock bands like AC/DC and Rush."
• "Kashkari is a 1991 graduate of Western Reserve Academy, a private college prep boarding and day school."
• "Prior to his career in finance, Mr. Kashkari was a R&D Principal Investigator at TRW in Redondo Beach, California where he developed technology for NASA space science missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope."
• An anonymous and totally unsubstantiated HuffPo commenter says he's a right-wing woman-hater! "This person and I have a mutual friend. We were at an event last year. A few of us sat outside that evening, to chat. My Significant Other and I joined him, his wife, and another couple. Oddly, they were at 2 tables, segregated by gender. The women talked weather. The guys talked politics.
  Kashkari starts dogging Hillary Clinton. He said "I'd never vote for her because I don't think women should be president." Verbatim. My SO told me this, and I heard part of it, as I was sitting nearby. The other women were oblivious.
  My SO defended women, but Kashkari wouldn't have it. He insisted women should never be leaders. Kashkari's own SO said earlier, that although she had a career, "I basically follow Neel around wherever he goes." Verbatim.
  Kaskhari then said global warming doesnt' exist. He said wind energy is stupid. And he would look up things on his Blackberry whenever my SO said something, to prove him wrong.
  Because he didn't like non GOPs, he later went to our mutual friend and said my SO had talked about being abducted by aliens. Yes, Neel Kashkari said this, in an attempt to attack someone he disagreed with."

And that's just about everything that the entire media has been able to come up with! Email us if you know more about Mr. Kashkari. I sure hope he's good with money things.

Who is she?

Briganti is Fox's VP of media relations, and #2 in the PR command structure under Brian Lewis. But if Lewis sets the tone, Briganti is the one who carries out the executions. Here's a very abbreviated list of her all time hits:

• When Anderson Cooper chided Fox for running with a false report of Obama going to a Muslim school, Briganti responded with, "Yet another cry for attention by the Paris Hilton of television news, Anderson Cooper.”
• Briganti attributed Keith Olbermann's attacks on Bill O'Reilly to his "personal demons, and said "In the meantime, we hope he enjoys his paranoid view from the bottom of the ratings ladder and wish him well on his inevitable trip to oblivion.”
• When Christiane Amanpour said CNN and Fox were intimidated by the Bush administration and practiced self-censorship in the run-up to the Iraq war, Briganti responded, "Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."

How did she get so notorious?

Briganti's real reputation was not earned by zingers about famous cable talking heads; it was earned with a conscious, longstanding policy of publicly bullying average beat reporters who wrote straight news that was not to Fox's liking. She once insinuated that a WSJ reporter wrote a story about Fox that the network didn't like because her hormones were acting up (the reporter was pregnant at the time). She and her colleagues routinely complain to reporters' bosses and try to get them in trouble with their editors for the crime of not praising Fox well enough.

She's famous for blacklisting reporters who do not cover Fox the way it wants to be covered. Whereas most media operations strive to present a professional face even if they hate a certain reporter, Fox does the opposite. One reporter told me that Irena blacklisted him and even turned him down for a requested tour of the Fox studios because she felt his coverage was negative. Also blacklisted in the past were an AP reporter and a Baltimore Sun reporter. The notable thing is that these are not commentators that Fox disagrees with; these are regular, run-of-the-mill TV reporters, reporting fact-based news, who were blacklisted because said facts disagreed with Fox.

Strangely, nearly everybody who's met Briganti in person says she's nice and personable. One reporter heard that when Irena first started going to Fox press events in New York, she was outed to reporters as a rather bubbly person. That undermined her queen-of-mean persona, and she had to cut back on her events schedule—or at least be a bit less nice. Others say that Briganti was in fact a nice person before she got to Fox, and that being there has turned her soul dark.

That may be because she is the mouthpiece of Fox chief Roger Ailes, the former Nixon hatchet man who loves to run Fox and its PR operation as if it was locked in a nasty political campaign. Since the golden rule of PR is that a flack is only as evil as her clients, it makes sense that Briganti would develop a reputation as a rare, unvarnished attack dog in media flackdom. She learned from the best.

When I worked at PRWeek a couple of years ago, I tried to write a profile of Briganti. This, after several people who had dealt with her assured me that she was the single meanest flack in the entire media world (which is true). I sent emails out to a list of people in the media that Briganti had publicly insulted. And what happened? Some turned me down, citing fear of her. Some didn't respond, out of fear. And one, in what I still consider to be the biggest bitch move I ever saw as a reporter, ran straight to Irena, telling her that a PRWeek reporter was out to smear her. This—from a reporter who had already been publicly smeared by Briganti—is akin to the kid whose response to being bullied is to grovel and try to please the bully further.

Briganti expertly strung me along for months, promising interviews in the near future and then pushing back the date continuously. Eventually the profile fell apart and never got written. She's good at what she does. She is still quite willing to offer negative tidbits about her competitors to this day.

Here's some more Briganti insight, culled from my own experience and what other reporters have told me:

• She is the single most blatant horse trader for stories in the entire media business. That means she will tell a reporter, "I'll give you this tidbit of news, but in return you have to write a negative story about this or that element of our competitors." When a reporter takes the tidbit but doesn't do Fox's bidding with the other fluff or nasty story (as no respectable reporter would), that reporter goes on Fox's shit list, and is subject to have a negative item about them planted by Briganti. This kind of blatant favor trading and retaliation would make PR people from, say, the Times or MSNBC laugh or shudder. Fox is the only practitioner of this level of media PR bloodsport.
• Some PR people have decided not to apply for jobs at Fox—jobs they could use—solely because of Briganti's bad reputation.
• Briganti and Fox routinely refuse to participate in any news story that also mentions CNN. They try to convince reporters to cut CNN out of television stories entirely in order to get quotes from Fox.
• We hear that even some within News Corp's corporate PR department (separate from Fox's specific PR department) dislike Briganti, because her bloody-hatchet reputation frankly makes the entire company look like a bunch of crazy people. Which doesn't go over well in corporate boardrooms. But Briganti, as Ailes' mouthpiece, seems to be untouchable.

Does it work?

This is the real question: does Fox's fixation on retaliation and fear tactics aimed at the working press actually benefit the network? Well, they certainly work in the sense of making reporters fear them; David Carr himself writes about the "series of alarms" that go off in his head when he writes any story about Fox News. One tipster asked about Briganti eagerly volunteered information (and called her a "cunt,") but added, "I can't be attached to this in any shape or form. Or she'll get me."

But does fear equal good media relations? In the short term, it can serve to temper negative stories about Fox. But it also serves to temper reporters' enthusiasm for any good items about Fox. And long term, it creates a press corps united in its hatred and resentment of your company.

Fox News'—and Briganti's—main mistake is attacking the normal, workaday reporters with such angry gusto. It's one thing to go after Keith Olbermann. It's another to go after beat reporters at trade magazines and newspapers who are simply doing their jobs. Ever so slowly, despite their skittishness and fear, media reporters will coalesce against Fox in a seething mass, just waiting for the chance to get their revenge for Briganti's slights.

And though one of Briganti's favorite pastimes is leaking to blogs, she'll come to find that her detractors can do the same thing just as easily. Blogs are far less likely to cower in the face of a threat of "denied access." And even papers like the Times are getting salty these days, as you can tell by Carr's piece. Smart PR people have found, with long experience, that it's better to try to treat people fairly and take negative stories in stride. Karma can be a bitch.

[And if you've dealt with Briganti and have some stories to tell? Recorded one of her tirades? Have emails to forward? And for god's sake, does anyone have a picture of this woman? Email us.]

Marc Jacobs had a bad childhood, his dad died, and his mother had a poor sense of style.

"I hate the term 'bad taste,' but my mother wasn't, like, a very chic person," he says. "Jane Fonda in Klute was definitely one of her role models, much to my father's dismay. But when I'd watch my mother getting dressed up to go out on dates and she'd be putting on three rows of false eyelashes and some hideous fox-trimmed brocade coat with a wet-look miniskirt and knee-high boots, I thought she was fabulous."

He doesn't talk to her any more. If he did, they would probably have to talk about working out, because that is what Marc Jacobs talks about. His trainer Easy is now his main man.

By the time they met, Jacobs was already dieting. "I never saw the bigger Marc," Easy says, behind aviator shades etched with mj, a Louis Vuitton gym bag at his feet.

"The fat guy that I kicked?" says Jacobs.

"The fat guy that we'd beat up if we saw him on the street," Easy laughs.

"The soft, blubbery Marc Jacobs," says Marc Jacobs.

Ha, screw your old self! But Easy is more than just a friend; he's a dawg.

Easy hesitates, then offers his wrist, which boasts a gold Rolex—a birthday present from Jacobs. On the back, it's inscribed love you dawg, mj. "I'm really proud of it," Easy says quietly.

As well you should be. At the end, Marc Jacobs sums up the philosophy that has enabled him to become a millionaire and worldwide celebrity:

"It's like saying, 'I want to look hot.' That is such a dumb thing to say," Jacobs notes. "But what's so cool about it is that you can say it. Yeah, I want a bunch of muscle queens at David Barton Gym to think that my body looks dope."

[pic via Arena Homme]

Recap: Lacy co-wrote the magazine story which catapulted Kevin Rose of Digg to wider fame. The coverline, over a photo of the linkdump founder with his thumbs up, proclaimed: How This Kid Made $60 Million In 18 Months. Cue Silicon Valley derision, which didn't stop Lacy quickly tapping a New York publisher for a rumored six figures.

And, in all these stories, even Valleywag glossed over the fact that Lacy is smoking, so smoking that she'd even be considered smoking in one of those cities where models and actresses congregate. She's also flirtatious, especially after a drink or two.

Not saying that's the reason for her success. Lacy's married, to a civilian, happily. The fact that she and Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp are both attractive, and know each other, does not mean that they're having an affair, or that she sleeps with other tech execs. And she got the book deal without ever meeting her agent, or publisher, in person, though they might have snuck a look at her photo, I guess.

But, in maintaining access to young entrepreneurs such as Max Levchin and Joshua Schachter, the likely subjects of her book, Lacy's looks don't hurt. Oh, I guess this counts as one of those bubble indicators. You know it's a bubble when ... the tech business books are written by hotties.

Not that there's anything wrong with that — boring guys built this industry. Just that the profile of Karim is the second-most painfully dull New York Times article I've ever read (after the Weddings section). An excerpt:

On Wednesday, during a walk across campus and a visit to his dorm room and the computer sciences building where he takes classes, Mr. Karim described himself as a nerd who gets excited about learning. Nothing in his understated demeanor suggests he is anything other than an ordinary graduate student, and he attracted little attention on campus in jeans, a blue polo shirt, a tan jacket and black Puma sneakers.

Last time a newspaper described someone this dull, the next paragraph read "No one suspected he'd murder an entire family."

With YouTube, Grad Student Hits Jackpot Again [NY Times]

Last fall, several Oracle representatives visited [a client] at his Aliso Viejo, Calif., office. They had noticed he was spending less on Oracle products and wanted to know why. He told them, "I don't ever see you unless you want to sell me something."

"I feel like a bootie call."

At a recent Oracle meeting, [Ingersoll-Rand CIO Barry] Libenson got a detailed look at the company's technology plans and spent two hours chatting with Mr. Ellison.

"So man...how's the house? No, the other one. Okay, the other other one."

Phillips Leads Effort at Oracle To Woo Its Users [Wall Street Journal]

He created a pen that had a ball and clip mechanism on top, for no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. "It immediately became the owner's prize possession, something you always wanted to play with...We began to call it 'having Jony-ness,' an extra something that would tap into the product's underlying emotion."

Who Is Jonathan Ive? [BusinessWeek]

Schachter became one of Web 2.0's favorite success stories when Yahoo bought him and his popular tagging service. We love him too, especially for how he sums up his hands-off approach with his users: "If I went in there and said, Hey, you're using that tag wrong, people would just tell me to fuck off."

Joshua Schachter, 32 [Technology Review]

Steve Case was not the soul of AOL. The founding chairman was squeezed out because, frankly, he didn't fit the culture. The real man running AOL was vice chairman Ted Leonsis. Dot-com scribe Michael Wolff writes in his book Burn Rate that when AOL brought in Leonsis,

Case became...the suit, and Leonsis became the visionary...He could talk the talk, he could sell the vision thing. He was creative, motivational, combative. He was everywhere...furiously insisting that AOL was what he wanted it to be, rather than what it was.

People believed him...You couldn't help thinking that what he was saying had to be true, that otherwise he'd never have the guts to stand up there and say it and huff and puff like that.

Sound familiar? That's the same reaction executive Jason Calacanis gets from many who read his personal blog.

He "has guts," he's a "very brave man." Every move he makes — calling for AOL to stop recording searches, having the nerve to hire his competitor's top users — wins more converts to the Jason Calacanis Fan Club. When journalist Paul Boutin went with Jason to a small press conference (a dozen reporters talking to Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt), he was impressed with Jason insisting to Eric that Google must be working on an operating system. As far as we know, Jason was dead wrong — but that didn't matter.

Like Ted Leonsis, Jason entered AOL through an acquisition. The company bought his blog network, Weblogs, Inc., in 2005. They expanded his power by putting him in charge of relaunching Netscape.com — a lousy gift, given the crochety user base that resisted his changes. But he stuck through it, proving to AOL that he's brave and tenacious. And what seems more important at AOL — getting it right the first time or risking the brand time and time again to chase new profits? Netscape was already dying, and even the most painful changeover could at least change the user base to a younger, more marketable crowd.

Jason is unafraid to point out his company's failures. We don't know how well this attitude fares within AOL, but publicly it's winning him much respect.

For example, a tired Leonsis blogged about AOL's recent massive leak of millions of user search records. "I personally feel just awful about it," he wrote in a one-paragraph entry.

Meanwhile, Calacanis wrote a full-page entry on how angry the "hard times at AOL" made him, and how hard it is to heal the damage done by the privacy violation or "the call" (a reference to the famous customer service call in which a rep refused to cancel a user's AOL account). His emotion could be real or rhetorical, but either way, he seems like a man on a mission to fix "his" company.

And he may get the chance. "Somebody's got to be the next CEO of AOL," Jason told himself while talking to Wired Magazine. "Why not you?" He even pointed out a video of AOL CEO Jonathan Miller calling Calacanis's hire part of AOL's "succession plan." That was a joke, said Calacanis, who regularly makes the same joke on his blog. But a big joke, told often enough, becomes true.

Photo: Revenge of the Dotcom Poster Boy [Wired]